Month: January 2017

Regina Spektor, Older and Taller (2016)

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This is beautiful.

Pop music of the older sort, which reached a peak in the 1960s, is about beauty and joy, and their usual antecedents, youth and love. As these things have faded out of our civilization, pop music turned to the shit we have now. But occasionally some of the old vintage shows up and surprises us and reminds how it can be. And Regina’s lyrics are clever and funny and sweet.

Here it is live:

Regina Spektor

Lyrics below the fold.

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Seth Barrett Tillman: Moving the Overton Window and Student Notes

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When you launch a new idea, its very newness puts it outside of the mainstream. Back in 2007, in an academic article, recess appointments were one of the issues du jour. I wrote that if a President made a recess appointment, a determined Senate could kill the appointment by ending its current session and immediately starting a new one (or by doing so twice, in the case of an intra-session recess appointment). See Seth Barrett Tillman, Senate Termination of Presidential Recess Appointments, 101 Nw. U. L. Rev. Colloquy 82 (2007), https://ssrn.com/abstract=956164 (the first part of a four-part Tillman-Kalt exchange).
 
I admit that the idea was a bit novel—but it does follow from the text of the Constitution’s Recess Appointments Clause. One student note called my “innovation[] … at once both plausible and absurd ….” David Frisof, Note, Plausible Absurdities and Practical Formalities: The Recess Appointments Clause in Theory and Practice, 112 Mich. L. Rev. 627, 643 (2014).
 
Two years later, in 2016, what was absurd is now standard fare.
 

All that the [Republican majority] Senate would need to do [to terminate a purported recess appointment by President Obama of Judge Garland to the Supreme Court] is end its next session by adjourning sine die and Garland’s term would end. This is because, under the Constitution’s Recess Appointments Clause, such appointments terminate at the end of the next Senate session. Adjourning sine die would require the cooperation of the House and a president’s signature, but that would be no obstacle come Jan. 20. In other words, Congress could terminate any recess appointment made by Obama in less than three weeks.

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Judith Curry Resigns Her Faculty Position.

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The world of Climate research lost a great academic figure as Judith Curry resigns her tenured faculty position at Georgia Tech.

She has figured largely in the climate debate as a skeptic in global warming.

I have retired from Georgia Tech, and I have no intention of seeking another academic or administrative position in a university or government agency. However, I most certainly am not retiring from professional life.

Why did I resign my tenured faculty position?

I’m ‘cashing out’ with 186 published journal articles and two books. The superficial reason is that I want to do other things, and no longer need my university salary. This opens up an opportunity for Georgia Tech to make a new hire (see advert).

The deeper reasons have to do with my growing disenchantment with universities, the academic field of climate science and scientists.

She has endured considerable abuse from the alarmist side. She is called a “heretic” in the alarmist circles.

over the past year or so she has become better known for something that annoys, even infuriates, many of her scientific colleagues. Curry has been engaging actively with the climate change skeptic community, largely by participating on outsider blogs such as Climate Audit, the Air Vent and the Black¬board. Along the way, she has come to question how climatologists react to those who question the science, no matter how well established it is. Although many of the skeptics recycle critiques that have long since been disproved, others, she believes, bring up valid points

So, she might have a point. However:

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